*temporary cheaper consumer goods "advantages" are offset by longer term economic decline caused by loss of actual purchasing power due to job loss, underemployment or shrinking wages accompanied by inflationary monetary policies and over extended credit all around. In many nations, the IMF/world Bank conmen have had a hand in it, by loaning "money" they poof create out of thin air and using the borrower's nations natural resources and other assets as collateral. It's international loan sharking on a massive scale, usury gone amok.
Virtually every economist I have ever read or heard speak disagrees with this, and believes that free trade and labor movement is the fastest way to ecoomic growth because countries produce goods in which they have a comparative advantage, thus increasing overall production to the maximum amount possible. Do you have any data to back up your hypothesis (although I hestitate to use that word so loosely)?
What kind of OS X user would be caught dead using such ancient, PC-originated technology (and I use that term loosely) as an MP3?
The kind of user who wants to use the standard format for audio compression that is widely used today, was widely used yesterday, and will be supported long into the future. The amount of work done on the mp3 spec is incredible -- check out LAME, which offers speedy, high-quality compression. Ars Technica's Machintoshian Archaia forum had a long thread about optimizing LAME for OS X. I can't find the thread, but I think it indicates that there's still good reason to encode using MP3s.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with using AAC. But mp3 still works for me and numerous others. Until a compelling reason exists for change, I'll continue ripping my CDs to mp3.
(I posted an almost identical comment here first, but since the two parent posts are similar I'll try again)
I think you can find music that doesn't suck, if you're not listening to an inane top 40 station. You could ask friends for recommendations -- I've met two music afficiandos who go to local clubs and listen to all kinds of unique CDs, and between the two of them I hear about interesting stuff. But it seldom comes from the radio.
I think placing all the blame on Clear Channel is too simple. Public radio stations also exist. My favorite is KCRW in Los Angeles, which has a 24/7 music stream. Check out their weekend eclectic shows for new bands.
Finally, I haven't seen CDBaby in the discussion yet, but I'm sure they're bound to get more than a few mentions -- and for good reason. With free previews from 30 seconds to two minutes, good relationships with customers and a great selection, what's not to love? That line sounds like a commerical, but this is one of those rare cases when it's true. Recently I bought E.S. Posthumus and O.A.R.'s first CD -- and love both.
Even among big-label music good stuff exists, if you're willing to look for it. This post has gone on long enough, but there are solutions -- if you're genuinely interested in solving the problem.
Other methods exist aside from the radio. You could ask friends for recommendations -- I've met two music afficiandos who go to local clubs and listen to all kinds of unique CDs, and between the two of them I hear about interesting stuff. But it seldom comes from the radio.
I think placing all the blame on Clear Channel is too simple. Public radio stations also exist. My favorite is KCRW in Los Angeles, which has a 24/7 music stream. Check out their weekend eclectic shows for new bands.
Finally, I haven't seen CDBaby in the discussion yet, but I'm sure they're bound to get more than a few mentions -- and for good reason. With free previews from 30 seconds to two minutes, good relationships with customers and a great selection, what's not to love? That line sounds like a commerical, but this is one of those rare cases when it's true. Recently I bought E.S. Posthumus and O.A.R.'s first CD -- and love both.
Even among big-label music good stuff exists, if you're willing to look for it. This post has gone on long enough, but there are solutions -- if you're genuinely interested in the problem.
On the Thinkpad 1.2 ghz Celeron with 384 mb ram and 5400 RPM HD I run, the difference between opening Mozilla 1.6 and IE is barley perceptible. Still, I load Mozilla quicklaunch on boot, and I think it adds a negligable amount to the ~2 minute boot sequence.
I'm not going to dispute that IE loads marginally faster, but for me the advantages of Mozilla far outweigh the minor speed gap. And I think the parent exaggerates the difference between the two.
Perhaps the poster and I have different standards of a decent computer, but I don't think mine is particularly fast. Nor do I think Mozilla loads particularly slow.
I'm living in Worcester and go to Boston every few weeks, and while I like Boston as much as the next guy, what merciless says isn't always true.
1. You can find smart, old grizzled veterans in virtually any city. Boston may have its fair share, or maybe even a little bit more, but to say you should stay in hopes of finding an old guy doesn't make much sense.
2. There are girls that are hot and not so hot anywhere. In Boston, you don't really know six months of the year because they wear parkas.
3. You can bike everywhere when it's not snowing (see six-months-of-the-year comment in 2.). Also, during the summer it's hot, muggy and disgusting most of the time.
4. Upstate New York has plenty of wilderness. It might not be as close as Boston, but once you're in the car, the difference between 10 minutes and half an hour is moot.
5. There's plenty of geek in plenty of sweet cities -- San Francisco, LA, NYC, Seattle, Portland -- and aside from that, I don't think holography classes (whatever those are) at adult education schools necessarily qualifies it as geek.
6. See 5., above, regarding what one can find in other cities. I used to live in Seattle, and may move back there -- and it's all there too.
No doubt, I like Boston, but let's remember that the weather is awful, the roads screwed up and many of its residents are rude. And it's got one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. The good still outweighs the bad, but think about cities like Portland too.
This book sounds like it would go well with Trading Up: The New American Luxury by Michael Silverstein. The premise of that book is that companies like Starbucks, GE's appliances division, American Girl, Victoria's Secret BMW and others have figured out that coupling modest technical advantages with persuasive advertising can dramatically increase sales.
There's an element of groupthink in that idea too -- that if others are doing it, so should I. They don't wield the con-man kind caliber of persuasion this book seems to favor, but they play on the idea that you'll be smarter, more attractive and a better person if you buy their brand. People will build emotional affinity with a company vastly out of proportion with the usefulness of that company's products.
I think discerning readers who read both will get a better idea of one of the problems of our times: if we turn on, tune in and veg out, someone is going to try to take advantage.
Israel is not dying anymore than *BSD or Apple. Although limited military censorship exists in Israel, its press is more free than virtually any other in the Middle East.
Israel fights terrorism every day, and apprehending or killing terrorist leaders is part of that fight.
The Israeli's think that increased opression will save them. (sic)
Israel fights implacable foes who hate it for its very existance, and calling them a "racist state" is so utterly wrong that I'm shocked someone modded your post up. An examanination of your posting history shows a number of -1, Flamebait comments relation to Israel. This is not the first article you've trolled.
This comment deserves every point of its +4 insightful.
The Internet is a tool, and it is an information tool so general purpose that it can be put to a variety of means. So I can use it to access slashdot and read about technology (and, by extension, political aspects of technology) to better myself and learn different perspectives.
At the same time, I have friends who seldom stray from Helicopter games or fashion quizzes. We use the web for radically different things.
I bet that's true around the world too. If the people don't care, nothing will change. Only half the population votes in US presidential elections, and that percentage has been falling consistently for years -- at the same time the web has been growing. There is no apparent correlation between web use and becoming more politically aware.
Objects are not inherently good or evil; they can be used by people toward either end. People who use their credit cards to pile up debt and ruin their financial standing may hurt themselves in the long term, but that doesn't make the credit (and remember that the card is merely a manifestation of the ephemeral idea of credit) itself evil.
Unfortunately, your analysis of torts is wrong. Most (all?) states require builders to have insurance, and large builders -- like these guys -- aren't some tiny operation that's going to collapse under a lawsuit. In addition, these days building torts come from more subtle problems than buildings falling down: for example, water leakages that result from using ineffective building material. Then one sues not only the builder, but also their insurance company. If you type "construction defect litigation" into Google, you'll find a million law firms specializing in it, and they're very good at what they do. If they couldn't win money for themselves and their clients, they wouldn't be in business.
Still, there's one part of your comment that's dead right and worth reiterating: "Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a more unscrupulous group than building developers."
I don't think I'm one of those "liberals". Nor am I teacher.
But that being said, what disturbs me is that you seem to have failed the same classes you deride -- like logic or rhetoric. You make numerous ludicrous accusations with no data to back them up, no studies of any kind, and somehow assume that the answer is to "cut funding to the aforementioned boring academic crap." Meanwhile, you say schools "have been placing too much emphasis on liberal social issues." Well, what schools spend too much time? How many hours shouled be spent on them? How much is "too much"?
Then you say bring up the red-herring economic argument that everyone should pay equally for educational taxes -- but everyone has to live somewhere, which means property taxes...
I'm not going to get into the rest of it. Your posting history demonstrates that you spew garbage in almost every response, and some of that garbage, like this post, somehow gets modded up.
I hear ya -- I spent $8 on my last Superbowl commerical.
On a more serious note, I agree with the rest of your post. I don't own a Mac, but since a friend who used to need help all the time bought an iBook, I haven't heard jack. The name's out, I see their laptops in every Starbucks I've ever entered, and they get attention on slashdot.
I think Microsoft is ignoring a cardinal rule of consumer gadgets: a few things that do one thing well are better than one device that does a few things poorly. In this case, they're trying to position themselves between the expensive portable DVD players that I've seen on planes / the iPod, and laptops. For $800, someone can get a laptop. For $1000, someone can get a pretty nice laptop.
I think it flops.
There are so many things wrong with this device I can't name them all. Sorry, it's not an iPod killer.
I think your conclusion is wrong and you present a defeatist attitude. Still, a situation similar to what you describe is in Brave New World, by Adulous (sp?) Huxley. In it, the people are sedated by happy drugs (the chemical equivalent American Idol), and the Savage who dares to question the system is put down because no one questions the government.
Today, people question the American government -- except that a majority is either too apathetic to decide, or agree with what the government is doing.
I liked it, both times that I read it -- once when I was young, around 9 or 10. I read it again when I was 18. I'll probably read it a third time when I'm 40 or 50, and I think each time I understand it better. In time, perhaps, I will grok it fully, but it contains complex and fascinating themes hidden beneath a children's story. With the first read I didn't understand the underlying ideas, and with the second reading I suspect I still missed much -- yet both times I enjoyed the plot and the characters, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I find it somewhat ironic that a comment decrying scientific illiteracy gives no concrete data and no support to backup an argument based, at best, on anecdote.
My favorite line is the first: "95% of the population is scientifically illterate." That's almost as good as 42% of all statistics being made up on the spot.
That isn't to say that the public is a scientifically literate; but gauging the national rate of scientific literacy based on someone's ramblings is as wrong as, say, preparing to ban DHMO based on a slick website.
(I'm not trying to insult the poster, and I think Sagan's book is excellent. For another book that has some thoughts on gullibility, see Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann by Richard Feynman. My favorite section deals with Feynmann and his habit of unlocking safes.)
Social programs have been decimated in the past four years. The Great Society has been destroyed in favor of corporations and the wealthy.
Do you have any evidence of social programs being "decimated" over the past four years? As part of my business, I read the Federal Register every day, and it contains billions of dollars in grant announcements, for everything from after school programming to job training to affordable housing to PE programs
Defense spending has been astronomical and does not need to get any bigger.
Have you read Empire by Niall Ferguson? In it, he writes about the British Empire and its huge expeditures when it was the world's top dog. The fact is that the United States today spends a lower proportionate amount of money on defense than any other sole world superpower in history. Even then, our power is constrained by our committments. One can argue if those committments are good or bad; but the fact is that the United States spends little relative to other superpowers through history.
Of course, those two items are red herrings compared to your main point, the the false-choice that the United States will either allow wire tapping and become an instant police state or disallow it and be free. I agree that wire tapping should only occur under order of a judge.
Some critics say the novel as an art form is dead, killed by (pick as many as you like): a) commercial interests / big publishing houses b) over-analysis from academics c) an apathetic reading public d) the growth of alternative entertainment like video games e) aging readership f) rehashing the same ideas over and over.
There are parallels between the book people and the video game people who say the sky is falling for whatever reason. I don't think so, at least with books, which I'm more familiar with: the marketplace today is more robust and diverse than at any other point in history. Virtually any book in print is available within a few days from Amazon, and online projects seek to digitize anything done before 1923. Experimental sites online offer fiction; K5 now has a section for it, and it's not half-bad. In video games, I think there are more options out there now than at any other point in history, especially because one can try anything from a thousand iterations of tetris and pac-man to Unreal Tournament 2004 to a game so avant garde I've never heard of it.
If anything, the problem is not death of novels from the creative side, it's a dearth of people interested in reading and understanding. I'm paraphrasing, but I remember reading about someone asking Gore Vidal why there are so few good books published these days; on the contrary, he said, the problem is that there are so few good readers.
When I look at writers like Elmore Leonard, Chang Rae-Lee, Coatzee, Michael Chabon and others, I'm blown away by their sheer technical virtuosity. Yet people decry the state of books.
To bring this around to video games, I think there are differences no one will dispute (the difficulty of designing a graphics engine, changing technology, huge teams necessary for today's games, etc.), but the bigger probelm is finding people who want to play the most innovative games is probably harder than finding people who want to play games that let them frag someone with a rocket launcher and do it over, and over, and over again. Innovation will still exist; but the better question is how many people will appreciate it. The questions are interesting, and much too subtle for the the hack and slash technique of the original article.
If someone wrote in asking "I need a reliable server for my small to medium-sized business, and I don't have a lot of money -- just for e-mail, host my database-driven website and little else. I haven't bought Windows, but that's all I really want. What should I get?" Everyone would scream LINUX because that's probably the best solution for the situation.
I use Windows on a day-to-day basis, but I've met lots of people who swear by iMovie, FCE and FCP.
He didn't ask for OS advice, but if the poster wants to make great DVDs in as little time as possible, I've heard only positive things about one OS and a few programs.
If you want music without connections to the RIAA, you can also try CDBaby. Although I live in the US (and thus can't vouch for out-of-country shipping), I can say I've bought a few disks and had no problems.
I first saw a link on Slashdot, and I think others have pointed to CDBaby in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what "turning a profic" means. Can I have it done professionally and legally in Amsterdam?
I can't believe these comments still get modded as funny.
And I can't believe it when some grammar/spelling comments get modded funny.
Tragically, that might result in a tremendous decline in new legislation.
Virtually every economist I have ever read or heard speak disagrees with this, and believes that free trade and labor movement is the fastest way to ecoomic growth because countries produce goods in which they have a comparative advantage, thus increasing overall production to the maximum amount possible. Do you have any data to back up your hypothesis (although I hestitate to use that word so loosely)?
At the Apple store, the PowerMac G5 1.6 Ghz starts at "$1799."
The kind of user who wants to use the standard format for audio compression that is widely used today, was widely used yesterday, and will be supported long into the future. The amount of work done on the mp3 spec is incredible -- check out LAME, which offers speedy, high-quality compression. Ars Technica's Machintoshian Archaia forum had a long thread about optimizing LAME for OS X. I can't find the thread, but I think it indicates that there's still good reason to encode using MP3s.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with using AAC. But mp3 still works for me and numerous others. Until a compelling reason exists for change, I'll continue ripping my CDs to mp3.
I think you can find music that doesn't suck, if you're not listening to an inane top 40 station. You could ask friends for recommendations -- I've met two music afficiandos who go to local clubs and listen to all kinds of unique CDs, and between the two of them I hear about interesting stuff. But it seldom comes from the radio.
I think placing all the blame on Clear Channel is too simple. Public radio stations also exist. My favorite is KCRW in Los Angeles, which has a 24/7 music stream. Check out their weekend eclectic shows for new bands.
Finally, I haven't seen CDBaby in the discussion yet, but I'm sure they're bound to get more than a few mentions -- and for good reason. With free previews from 30 seconds to two minutes, good relationships with customers and a great selection, what's not to love? That line sounds like a commerical, but this is one of those rare cases when it's true. Recently I bought E.S. Posthumus and O.A.R.'s first CD -- and love both.
Even among big-label music good stuff exists, if you're willing to look for it. This post has gone on long enough, but there are solutions -- if you're genuinely interested in solving the problem.
I think placing all the blame on Clear Channel is too simple. Public radio stations also exist. My favorite is KCRW in Los Angeles, which has a 24/7 music stream. Check out their weekend eclectic shows for new bands.
Finally, I haven't seen CDBaby in the discussion yet, but I'm sure they're bound to get more than a few mentions -- and for good reason. With free previews from 30 seconds to two minutes, good relationships with customers and a great selection, what's not to love? That line sounds like a commerical, but this is one of those rare cases when it's true. Recently I bought E.S. Posthumus and O.A.R.'s first CD -- and love both.
Even among big-label music good stuff exists, if you're willing to look for it. This post has gone on long enough, but there are solutions -- if you're genuinely interested in the problem.
I'm not going to dispute that IE loads marginally faster, but for me the advantages of Mozilla far outweigh the minor speed gap. And I think the parent exaggerates the difference between the two.
Perhaps the poster and I have different standards of a decent computer, but I don't think mine is particularly fast. Nor do I think Mozilla loads particularly slow.
1. You can find smart, old grizzled veterans in virtually any city. Boston may have its fair share, or maybe even a little bit more, but to say you should stay in hopes of finding an old guy doesn't make much sense.
2. There are girls that are hot and not so hot anywhere. In Boston, you don't really know six months of the year because they wear parkas.
3. You can bike everywhere when it's not snowing (see six-months-of-the-year comment in 2.). Also, during the summer it's hot, muggy and disgusting most of the time.
4. Upstate New York has plenty of wilderness. It might not be as close as Boston, but once you're in the car, the difference between 10 minutes and half an hour is moot.
5. There's plenty of geek in plenty of sweet cities -- San Francisco, LA, NYC, Seattle, Portland -- and aside from that, I don't think holography classes (whatever those are) at adult education schools necessarily qualifies it as geek.
6. See 5., above, regarding what one can find in other cities. I used to live in Seattle, and may move back there -- and it's all there too.
No doubt, I like Boston, but let's remember that the weather is awful, the roads screwed up and many of its residents are rude. And it's got one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. The good still outweighs the bad, but think about cities like Portland too.
There's an element of groupthink in that idea too -- that if others are doing it, so should I. They don't wield the con-man kind caliber of persuasion this book seems to favor, but they play on the idea that you'll be smarter, more attractive and a better person if you buy their brand. People will build emotional affinity with a company vastly out of proportion with the usefulness of that company's products.
I think discerning readers who read both will get a better idea of one of the problems of our times: if we turn on, tune in and veg out, someone is going to try to take advantage.
Israel fights terrorism every day, and apprehending or killing terrorist leaders is part of that fight.
The Israeli's think that increased opression will save them. (sic)
Israel fights implacable foes who hate it for its very existance, and calling them a "racist state" is so utterly wrong that I'm shocked someone modded your post up. An examanination of your posting history shows a number of -1, Flamebait comments relation to Israel. This is not the first article you've trolled.
The Internet is a tool, and it is an information tool so general purpose that it can be put to a variety of means. So I can use it to access slashdot and read about technology (and, by extension, political aspects of technology) to better myself and learn different perspectives.
At the same time, I have friends who seldom stray from Helicopter games or fashion quizzes. We use the web for radically different things.
I bet that's true around the world too. If the people don't care, nothing will change. Only half the population votes in US presidential elections, and that percentage has been falling consistently for years -- at the same time the web has been growing. There is no apparent correlation between web use and becoming more politically aware.
And she's brilliant,and a risk taker. Need I say more?
Objects are not inherently good or evil; they can be used by people toward either end. People who use their credit cards to pile up debt and ruin their financial standing may hurt themselves in the long term, but that doesn't make the credit (and remember that the card is merely a manifestation of the ephemeral idea of credit) itself evil.
Still, there's one part of your comment that's dead right and worth reiterating: "Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a more unscrupulous group than building developers."
But that being said, what disturbs me is that you seem to have failed the same classes you deride -- like logic or rhetoric. You make numerous ludicrous accusations with no data to back them up, no studies of any kind, and somehow assume that the answer is to "cut funding to the aforementioned boring academic crap." Meanwhile, you say schools "have been placing too much emphasis on liberal social issues." Well, what schools spend too much time? How many hours shouled be spent on them? How much is "too much"?
Then you say bring up the red-herring economic argument that everyone should pay equally for educational taxes -- but everyone has to live somewhere, which means property taxes...
I'm not going to get into the rest of it. Your posting history demonstrates that you spew garbage in almost every response, and some of that garbage, like this post, somehow gets modded up.
I hear ya -- I spent $8 on my last Superbowl commerical.
On a more serious note, I agree with the rest of your post. I don't own a Mac, but since a friend who used to need help all the time bought an iBook, I haven't heard jack. The name's out, I see their laptops in every Starbucks I've ever entered, and they get attention on slashdot.
I think it flops.
There are so many things wrong with this device I can't name them all. Sorry, it's not an iPod killer.
Today, people question the American government -- except that a majority is either too apathetic to decide, or agree with what the government is doing.
I liked it, both times that I read it -- once when I was young, around 9 or 10. I read it again when I was 18. I'll probably read it a third time when I'm 40 or 50, and I think each time I understand it better. In time, perhaps, I will grok it fully, but it contains complex and fascinating themes hidden beneath a children's story. With the first read I didn't understand the underlying ideas, and with the second reading I suspect I still missed much -- yet both times I enjoyed the plot and the characters, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
My favorite line is the first: "95% of the population is scientifically illterate." That's almost as good as 42% of all statistics being made up on the spot.
That isn't to say that the public is a scientifically literate; but gauging the national rate of scientific literacy based on someone's ramblings is as wrong as, say, preparing to ban DHMO based on a slick website.
(I'm not trying to insult the poster, and I think Sagan's book is excellent. For another book that has some thoughts on gullibility, see Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann by Richard Feynman. My favorite section deals with Feynmann and his habit of unlocking safes.)
Do you have any evidence of social programs being "decimated" over the past four years? As part of my business, I read the Federal Register every day, and it contains billions of dollars in grant announcements, for everything from after school programming to job training to affordable housing to PE programs
Defense spending has been astronomical and does not need to get any bigger.
Have you read Empire by Niall Ferguson? In it, he writes about the British Empire and its huge expeditures when it was the world's top dog. The fact is that the United States today spends a lower proportionate amount of money on defense than any other sole world superpower in history. Even then, our power is constrained by our committments. One can argue if those committments are good or bad; but the fact is that the United States spends little relative to other superpowers through history.
Of course, those two items are red herrings compared to your main point, the the false-choice that the United States will either allow wire tapping and become an instant police state or disallow it and be free. I agree that wire tapping should only occur under order of a judge.
There are parallels between the book people and the video game people who say the sky is falling for whatever reason. I don't think so, at least with books, which I'm more familiar with: the marketplace today is more robust and diverse than at any other point in history. Virtually any book in print is available within a few days from Amazon, and online projects seek to digitize anything done before 1923. Experimental sites online offer fiction; K5 now has a section for it, and it's not half-bad. In video games, I think there are more options out there now than at any other point in history, especially because one can try anything from a thousand iterations of tetris and pac-man to Unreal Tournament 2004 to a game so avant garde I've never heard of it.
If anything, the problem is not death of novels from the creative side, it's a dearth of people interested in reading and understanding. I'm paraphrasing, but I remember reading about someone asking Gore Vidal why there are so few good books published these days; on the contrary, he said, the problem is that there are so few good readers.
When I look at writers like Elmore Leonard, Chang Rae-Lee, Coatzee, Michael Chabon and others, I'm blown away by their sheer technical virtuosity. Yet people decry the state of books.
To bring this around to video games, I think there are differences no one will dispute (the difficulty of designing a graphics engine, changing technology, huge teams necessary for today's games, etc.), but the bigger probelm is finding people who want to play the most innovative games is probably harder than finding people who want to play games that let them frag someone with a rocket launcher and do it over, and over, and over again. Innovation will still exist; but the better question is how many people will appreciate it. The questions are interesting, and much too subtle for the the hack and slash technique of the original article.
I use Windows on a day-to-day basis, but I've met lots of people who swear by iMovie, FCE and FCP.
He didn't ask for OS advice, but if the poster wants to make great DVDs in as little time as possible, I've heard only positive things about one OS and a few programs.
I first saw a link on Slashdot, and I think others have pointed to CDBaby in this thread.